Meaning: A rowdy, a tough, a nasty, a ruffian, a petty thug, destructive young person.

Notes: We think of hooligans as gang members, young people who think it fun to damage property. This behavior is known as hooliganism. This noun was at one time used as a verb meaning "to bully, treat roughly" in the UK but that usage has since fallen by the wayside.

In Play: The crucial concepts surrounding this word are "young" and "mean", so it works well in, "Some hooligan tried to knock over my mailbox last night but broke his baseball bat instead." Every generation produces hooligans in new and unexpected places: "More and more cities are tiring of the work of hooligan artists (artistic hooligans?), who spray-paint their work on building walls that do not belong to them."

Word History: This word first appeared in print in the police-court reports of a newspaper in the summer of 1898. That it comes from a corruption of Hooley's gang is highly dubious. More likely it derives from the name of some Irish ruffian by the name of Hooligan. figured in a music-hall song of the eighteen-nineties, which described the doings of a rowdy Irish family, and a comic Irish character of the name appeared in a series of adventures in Funny Folks. (Today we owe a debt of gratitude to the rowdy mind of Larry Brady, who keeps coming up with fascinating words like this.)

There are of course other explanations. The late Swedish asst. prof. Johannes Hedberg believed in an eastern origin. One of his reasons was that that the word got to Sweden from Russia via Finland.

One of the greatest polyglots of our times, Pent Nurmekund in Tartu, Estonia, goes further still:

Speakers of Russian sometimes link chuligán to chulít (find fault with, revile), but I believe the word to have arrived from the Far East.

He has found similar words among Turkic people in Central Asia, and even in Chinese (wulaihan), Korean (murvehan)and Japanese (buraikan). For several reasons, the most probable origin for the Russian word is a Mongolian or Tungus word. In Mongolian, chulagan is used for thieves, in Tungus chulacha means thief and hulun (chulun) a loafer.

(From a book by the amazing polyglot Erik V. Gunnemark, which with the collaboration of Amorey Gethin, who knows even more languages, appears in an English version.)